The U.S. Supreme Court said Monday that it will not review a North Carolina death penalty case in which a prosecutor admitted years later that he’d removed a potential juror from the pool because she was a woman.
Bryan Christopher Bell and Antwaun Kyral Sims were tried and convicted in the kidnapping, beating, and burning of the 89-year-old aunt of veteran state legislator Leo Daughtry in January 2000. The case was so high-profile that the trial was moved from Sampson County, where the crime took place, to Onslow County. Bell is on death row and Sims is currently serving a life sentence.
At the center of the appeal to SCOTUS was Assistant District Attorney Gregory Butler’s decision to remove Viola Morrow as a potential juror. When defense attorneys alleged racism in jury selection, Butler insisted he struck Morrow, who was Black, because of a health condition and her concerns about how it might affect her ability to serve. Eleven years later, however, Butler made a stunning admission in an affidavit: he got rid of Morrow not because she was Black, but because she was a woman who had children close in age to the defendants.
Such an admission is rare. But it wasn’t enough to sway the North Carolina Supreme Court, which ruled in March 2025 that the gender-discrimination claims were procedurally barred because they had not been raised at the initial trial. Bell and Sims then filed a petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case.
The nation’s highest court forbade gender discrimination in jury selection more than 30 years ago in the case J.E.B. v. Alabama, but legal experts say North Carolina appellate courts have done little to enforce the prohibition.
John Mills, an attorney who represented both men, said he is shocked that the court decided to pass on their request to review a case where the prosecutor admitted the discrimination. (In an email to The Assembly last year, Butler denied that he ever considered race or gender in his decision to remove the juror; he declined to comment further in a phone interview.)
Bell is still pursuing claims under the Racial Justice Act, which allows death-row inmates to challenge their sentence if they can demonstrate that racial discrimination played a role. Sims is planning to appeal in federal court on the gender-discrimination claims.
“I want people to know that this issue is not going away,” Mills said. “I look forward to how this plays out in the lower federal courts.”